Words for colours are changeable things. This came for the most part to mind when I was reading through some fashion pages the other day as part of my timeless search for new vocabulary. By all means, I love the beautiful colours of a slick—and wonder how the Fourth Estate could be able to come up with such metallic effects. Or if not sharp, why is it the colours are not monotonous and the combinations are really wonderful?
Then, I have off pat the “peach” colour that is completing the set of my Crayola: it is written off as “flesh.” The name I don’t recognise was changed to “peach” on account of a profane basis.
Well, if a word so new and it seems that so clearly defined can change meaning, almost without anyone noticing, I don't know it is not so unforeseen that other colour words have done the same through history, even those for the major colours that you would think too well-grounded in life to suffer much change.
Take “yellow” for instance. It’s a colour like that of ripe mangoes. This has evolved into many terms including “jaundice,” “gold,” “choleric,” and “yolk.” It’s a colour for a person of mixed racial origin, specially of black and white heritage, whose skin is yellowish or yellowish brown.
The word “blue” has had an even more exciting history. It was changed into the Greek “phalos,” “white,” and consequently to “pale” and the colour of bruised skin. “Blue” is the pure colour of a clear sky.
Nonetheless, the word “green” seems always to have been tightly bound to the idea of growing things: undeniably “green” and “grow” come from the same Germanic derivation.
“Red” is another colour-fast word, related to the Greek "eruthros" and to the English words “russet,” “ruby,” “ruddy,” and “rust.”
In another colour transition, the hair colour “auburn” once meant “brownish-white” or “yellowish-white” and only shifted sense to refer to a shade of brown in the sixteenth century, on the face of it because it was sometimes spelled “abrun” or “a-brown” and was misunderstood as deriving from “brown.” Though some older dictionary definitions say it could mean either “golden-brown” or “reddish-brown,” the sense has continued to shift so that now it refers solely to the second colour.
The word “pink,” my favourite colour, is generally agreed to be derived from the similar Dutch word “pinck.” This was borrowed into English and applied to the flowers of the common English cottage-garden species Dianthus plumarius. The other foreboding says it came from “pinck” in the sense of “hole” (which is the origin of pinking shears, the device used to make ornamental holes in cloth) and was applied to the flowers of Dianthus because they resembled the contour of the holes. Either way, the colour comes from the plant, not the other way round.
Many other new-sprung colour words are similarly derived from the colours of plants and natural substances, which have long been raided by colourists in search for names to apply to the ever-more delicate shades which turn up in industrial colour charts. There’s no great bolt from the blue in colours like “cinnamon,” “tangerine,” “oyster,” “lime,” “melon,” “glacier,” “apple white,” “ivory,” “silver,” “chocolate,” “amber,” or “aubergine,” though there almost certainly is in puce, a colour which seems inherently humorous even if you don’t know that it really means “flea coloured.” Remarkably, most of these colours can be found on Tiki Farm with the exception of “ube,” which is called taro by many.
Fairly a large set of our less-common colour words have equally come from French: the currently-fashionable shade “taupe” for a brownish-grey colour comes from the word for mole; an earlier fashion gave us “greige,” from the French word meaning “the colour of raw silk”; “beige” is a transferred epithet from the French name for a type of woollen fabric usually left undyed; and “maroon” is derived from the French name for the sweet chestnut, whose fruit is that distinctive brownish-red colour.
Other colour names bounce from those for expensive stones: "aquamarine," for instance, was initially the name of a type of beryl sea water. “Ultramarine” might seem to be a directly-related word, as it refers to a deeper shade of blue, but the “ultra” part of it means “beyond” in the literal sense—a stone which came from across or beyond the sea, since it was made from ground-up lapis lazuli. The word “turquoise” comes from the Old French “pierre turquoise,” the “Turkish stone,” though the word is now used more recurrently in its colour sense than in allusion to the stone, unlike emerald, which retains both its literal and figurative senses in about equal measure.
The colour orange derives originally from the Sanskrit word “narangah” for the fruit. It’s a colour between yellow and red in the spectrum. In French, it became corrupted to “orange,” being strongly influenced by the name of the town of Orange in south-eastern France which used to be a centre of the orange trade.
“Purple” comes to us from Greek "porphyra"
and refers to the dye extracted from a species of Mediterranean shellfish, which was so rare and valuable that it was reserved for regal costumes. On the other hand, the colour from the pigment is very changeable, and could at times be crimson or deep red.
“Magenta,” a key colour in your inkjet printer, derives its name from a dye discovered by Simpson, Nicholson, and Maule—a London-based company. It was named after a town in north Italy—during the year of the battle.
The word “crimson” I’ve just used comes from the Sanskrit “krmi-ja,” The creepy-crawly was called the “kermes” but a continuing mistaken idea that it was a maggot also gave rise to the word “vermilion.” Yet another word for this colour, “scarlet,” was not originally a colour word whatsoever, but referred to a premium cloth which may have originated in Persia, and which could have been “blue” or “green,” though it was commonly dyed red.
The word “livid” which turned up earlier has a strange history, which may be guessed from the entry in one of my etymological dictionaries which said “livid: see sloe.” The connection is that the word “sloe” probably originally meant the “blue-black” fruit, perhaps being derived from an ancient Germanic form “slaikhwon,” which may be linked with the Latin livere, “(be) blue-black.” It became applied to the similar colour of bruises when it was first introduced in the seventeenth century (similar in sense to the idiom black and blue). But—perhaps because the colour of bruises is so variable—its sense shifted about in a confusing manner until any firm connection with a single colour was lost. As an illustration of this, my dictionary gives five references for the word in its index: “blackish,” “gray,” “colourless,” “purple,” and “angry.” This shift of associations may have come about because the word was applied to the colour of death, say in phrases like the livid lips of the corpse, in which the word means “ashen,” or “leaden.” It may then have become linked to the colour of the skin texture during rage, in which the face can go a dead colour through blood draining from the skin.
My presumption is that the word became so strongly attached to this metaphoric sense of “enraged” that it was incorrectly re-applied to the flushed, purplish colour which is even more common when someone is fuming. What is definite is that the only safe way to use “livid” these days is to stay away from colour associations and use only its rhetorical sense of “enraged.”
Trying to keep track of these shifting colour names can make you absolutely discoloured.
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